Against Interpretation (9 page)

Camus’
Notebooks
contain an assortment of things. They are literary work-books, quarries for his writings, in which phrases, scraps of overheard conversation, ideas for stories, and sometimes whole paragraphs later incorporated into the novels and essays, were first jotted down. These sections of the
Notebooks
are sketchy stuff, and for that reason I doubt if they will be terribly exciting even to aficionados of Camus’ fiction, despite the zealous annotation and correlation with the published works supplied by Mr. Thody. The
Notebooks
also contain a miscellany of reading notes (Spengler, Renaissance history, etc.) of a rather limited range—the vast reading that went into writing
The Rebel
is certainly not recorded here—and a number of maxims and reflections on psychological and moral themes. Some of these reflections have a great deal of boldness and finesse. They are worth reading, and they might help dispel one current image of Camus—according to which he was a sort of Raymond Aron, a man deranged by German philosophy belatedly converting to Anglo-Saxon empiricism and common sense under the name of “Mediterranean” virtue. The
Notebooks,
at least this first volume, exude an endearing atmosphere of domesticated Nietzscheanism. The young Camus writes as a French Nietzsche, melancholy where Nietzsche is savage, stoical where Nietzsche is outraged, impersonal and objective in tone where Nietzsche is personal and subjective to the point of mania. And lastly, the
Notebooks
are full of personal comments—declarations and resolutions, one might better describe them—of a markedly impersonal nature.

Impersonality is perhaps the most telling thing about Camus’
Notebooks;
they are so anti-autobiographical. It is hard to remember, when reading the
Notebooks,
that Camus was a man who had a very interesting life, a life (unlike that of many writers) interesting not only in an interior but also in an outward sense. Scarcely anything of this life is preserved in the
Notebooks.
There is nothing about his family, to whom he was closely attached. Neither is there any mention of the events which took place in this period: his work with the Théâtre de l’Équipe, his first and second marriages, his membership in the Communist Party, his career as an editor of a left-wing Algerian newspaper.

Of course, a writer’s journal must not be judged by the standards of a diary. The notebooks of a writer have a very special function: in them he builds up, piece by piece, the identity of a writer to himself. Typically, writers’ notebooks are crammed with statements about the will: the will to write, the will to love, the will to renounce love, the will to go on living. The journal is where a writer is heroic to himself. In it he exists solely as a perceiving, suffering, struggling being. That is why all the personal comments in Camus’
Notebooks
are of so impersonal a nature, and completely exclude the events and the people in his life. Camus writes about himself only as a solitary—a solitary reader, voyeur, sun-and-sea worshipper, and walker in the world. In this he is being very much the writer. Solitariness is the indispensable metaphor of the modern writer’s consciousness, not only to self-declared emotional misfits like Pavese, but even to as sociable and socially conscientious a man as Camus.

Thus the
Notebooks,
while absorbing reading, do not resolve the question of Camus’ permanent stature or deepen our sense of him as a man. Camus was, in the words of Sartre, “the admirable conjunction of a man, of an action, and of a work.” Today only the work remains. And whatever that conjunction of man, action, and work inspired in the minds and hearts of his thousands of readers and admirers cannot be wholly reconstituted by experience of the work alone. It would have been an important and happy occurrence if Camus’
Notebooks
had survived their author to give us more than they do of the man, but unfortunately they do not.

[
1963
]

Michel Leiris’
Manhood

A
RRIVING
in translation in the year 1963, Michel Leiris’ brilliant autobiographical narrative
L’Age d’Homme,
is at first rather puzzling.
Manhood,
as it is called in English, appears without any covering note.
6
There is no way for the reader to find out that Leiris, now in his sixties and the author of some twenty books, none of which are yet in English, is an important poet and senior survivor of the Surrealist generation in Paris in the 1920s, and a fairly eminent anthropologist. Nor does the American edition explain that
Manhood
is not recent—that it was in fact written in the early 1930s, first published in 1939, and republished with an important prefatory essay, “Literature Considered as a Bullfight,” in 1946, when it had a great succès
de scandale.
Although autobiographies can enthrall even though we have no prior interest—or reason for becoming interested—in the writer, the fact that Leiris is unknown here complicates matters, because his book is very much part of a life-history as well as a life-work.

In 1929, Leiris suffered a severe mental crisis, which included becoming impotent, and underwent a year or so of psychiatric treatment. In 1930, when he was thirty-four years old, he began
Manhood.
At that time, he was a poet, strongly influenced by Apollinaire and by his friend Max Jacob; he had already published several volumes of poetry, the first of which is
Simulacre
(1925); and in the same year that he began
Manhood,
he wrote a remarkable novel in the Surrealist manner,
Aurora.
But shortly after beginning
Manhood
(it was not finished until 1935), Leiris entered upon a new career—as an anthropologist. He made a field trip to Africa (Dakar and Djibouti) in 1931-33, and upon his return to Paris joined the staff of the Musée de l’Homme, where he remains, in an important curatorial post, to the present day. No trace of this startling shift—from bohemian and poet to scholar and museum bureaucrat—is recorded in the wholly intimate disclosures of
Manhood.
There is nothing in the book of the accomplishments of the poet or the anthropologist. One feels there cannot be; to have recorded them would mar the impression of failure.

Instead of a history of his life, Leiris gives us a catalogue of its limitations.
Manhood
begins not with “I was born in…” but with a matter-of-fact description of the author’s body. We learn in the first pages of Leiris’ incipient baldness, of a chronic inflammation of the eyelids, of his meager sexual capacities, of his tendency to hunch his shoulders when sitting and to scratch his anal region when he is alone, of a traumatic tonsillectomy undergone as a child, of an equally traumatic infection in his penis; and, subsequently, of his hypochondria, of his cowardice in all situations of the slightest danger, of his inability to speak any foreign language fluently, of his pitiful incompetence in physical sports. His character, too, is described under the aspect of limitation: Leiris presents it as “corroded” with morbid and aggressive fantasies concerning the flesh in general and women in particular.
Manhood
is a manual of abjection—anecdotes and fantasies and verbal associations and dreams set down in the tones of a man, partly anesthetized, curiously fingering his own wounds.

One may think of Leiris’ book as an especially powerful instance of the venerable preoccupation with sincerity peculiar to French letters. From Montaigne’s Essays and Rousseau’s
Confessions
through Stendhal’s journals to the modern confessions of Gide, Jouhandeau, and Genet, the great writers of France have been concerned to a singular extent with the detached presentation of intimate feelings, particularly those connected with sexuality and ambition. In the name of sincerity, both in autobiographical form and in the form of fiction (as in Constant, Laclos, Proust), French writers have been coolly exploring erotic manias, and speculating on techniques of emotional disengagement. It is this longstanding preoccupation with sincerity—over and beyond emotional expressiveness—that gives a severity, a certain classicism even, to most French works of the romantic period. But to see Leiris’ book simply in this way does it an injustice.
Manhood
is odder, harsher than such a lineage suggests. Far more than any avowals to be found in the great French autobiographical documents of incestuous feelings, sadism, homosexuality, masochism, and crass promiscuity, what Leiris admits to is obscene and repulsive. It is not especially what Leiris has done that shocks. Action is not his forte, and his vices are those of a fearfully cold sensual temperament—wormy failures and deficiencies more often than lurid acts. It is because Leiris’ attitude is unredeemed by the slightest tinge of self-respect. This lack of esteem or respect for himself is obscene. All the other great confessional works of French letters proceed out of self-love, and have the clear purpose of defending and justifying the self. Leiris loathes himself, and can neither defend nor justify.
Manhood
is an exercise in shamelessness—a sequence of self-exposures of a craven, morbid, damaged temperament. It is not incidentally, in the course of his narration, that Leiris reveals what is disgusting about himself. What is disgusting is the
topic
of his book.

One may well ask: who cares?
Manhood
undoubtedly has a certain value as a clinical document; it is full of lore for the professional student of mental aberration. But the book would not be worth attention did it not have value as literature. This, I think, it does—though, like so many modern works of literature, it makes its way as anti-literature. (Indeed, much of the modern movement in the arts presents itself as anti-art.) Paradoxically, it is just its animus to the idea of literature that makes
Manhood
—a very carefully (though not beautifully) written and subtly executed book—interesting as literature. In the same way, it is precisely through
Manhood’s
unstated rejection of the rationalist project of self-understanding that Leiris makes his contribution to it.

The question that Leiris answers in
Manhood
in not an intellectual one. It is what we would call a psychological—and the French, a moral—question. Leiris is not trying to understand himself. Neither has he written
Manhood
to be forgiven, or to be loved. Leiris writes to appall, and thereby to receive from his readers the gift of a strong emotion—the emotion needed to defend himself against the indignation and disgust he expects to arouse in his readers. Literature becomes a mode of psychotechnics. As he explains in the prefatory essay “
De la Litérature Considérée commeune Tauromachie,
” to be a writer, a man of letters, is not enough. It is boring, pallid. It lacks danger. Leiris must feel, as he writes, the equivalent of the bullfighter’s knowledge that he risks being gored. Only then is writing worthwhile. But how can the writer achieve this invigorating sense of mortal danger? Leiris’ answer is: through self-exposure, through
not
defending himself; not through fabricating works of art, objectifications of himself, but through laying himself—his own person—on the line of fire. But we, the readers, the spectators of this bloody act, know that when it is performed well (think of how the bullfight is discussed as a preeminently aesthetic, ceremonial act) it becomes, whatever the disavowals of literature—literature.

A writer who subscribes to a program similar to Leiris’ for creating literature inadvertently, out of self-laceration and self-exposure, is Norman Mailer. For some years now Mailer has conceived of writing as a blood sport (more often in the image of boxing than bullfighting), and insisted that the better writer is the man who dares more, who risks more. For this reason, Mailer has used himself increasingly as the subject of his essays and quasi-fiction. But there are big differences between Mailer and Leiris, and they are revealing. In Mailer, this enthusiasm for danger appears much of the time in a base form—as megalomania, and a tiresome competitiveness with other writers. In Leiris’ writings, there is no awareness of a literary scene, of other writers, fellow-toreros competing for the most ravishing danger. (On the contrary, Leiris, who has known practically everybody, painters as well as writers, is extremely deferential when he discusses the work and person of his friends.) Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success. Leiris in his writings is not concerned with success at all. Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes. Leiris records the defeats of his own virility; completely incompetent in the arts of the body, he is perpetually in training to extinguish himself; even his successes look to him like failures. Perhaps the essential contrast between the optimistic, populist temperament of most American writers and the drastically alienated posture of the best European writers can be seen here. Leiris is a much more subjective, less ideological writer than Mailer. Mailer shows us how his private travails and weaknesses produce the strength of his public work—and wants to engage the reader in this process of transformation. But Leiris doesn’t see any continuity between his public self, distinguished as that may be, and his private weaknesses. While Mailer’s motives for self-exposure may be described as spiritual (not to mention worldly) ambitiousness—a desire to prove himself through repeated ordeals—Leiris’ motives are more desperate: he wishes to prove, not that he is heroic, but that he is at all. Leiris loathes his physical cowardice and ineptness. Yet far from wishing to exonerate himself for his ugly failings, what he seems to wish is to convince himself that this unsatisfactory body—and this unseemly character—really exist. Haunted by a sense of the unreality of the world, and ultimately of himself, Leiris searches for a strong, unequivocal feeling. But, like a regular textbook romantic, the only emotion Leiris acknowledges is the one which involves a risk of death. “With a bitterness that I never suspected before, I have just realized that all I need in order to save myself is a certain fervor,” he writes in
Manhood,
“but that this world lacks anything for which I would give my life.” All emotions are mortal to Leiris, or they are nothing. What is real is defined as that which involves the risk of death. One knows from his books that Leiris has made several serious attempts at suicide; it might be said that, for him, life becomes real only when placed under the threat of suicide. The same is true of the vocation of literature. In a view like Leiris’, literature has value only as a means of enhancing virility, or as a means of suicide.